HEALTH IS WEALTH

Spotting those at high Alzheimer’s risk

13 August, 2017 12:00 AM

“Everyone thinks Alzheimer’s is one disease, but it’s not,” said P. Murali Doraiswamy, M.D., professor of psychiatry and director of the neurocognitive disorders program at Duke Health.

“There are many subgroups. If you enrol all different types of people in a trial, but your drug is targeting only one biological pathway, of course the people who don’t have that abnormality are not going to respond to the drug, and the trial is going to fail.”

But if scientists grouped people with similar types of cognitive impairment, they could more precisely test the impact of investigational drugs, according to findings in a July 28 article in the journal Scientific Reports, a publication of Nature Research.

The research was jointly led by Dragan Gamberger, Ph.D., an artificial intelligence expert at the Rudjer Boskovic Institute in Croatia and Doraiswamy.

To identify similar disease types, the team used a multilayer clustering algorithm to sort through dozens of data points from two large studies of the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. Study data included cognition tests, brain scans and spinal fluid biomarkers from 562 people with mild cognitive impairment who were followed for up to five years.

Two groups of interest emerged — those whose cognition declined significantly and those who saw little or no decline in their symptoms. The brain scans of the 240 so-called ‘rapid decliners’ showed twice the rate of atrophy as the 184 people with a slow-moving disease. Rapid decliners also progressed from mild cognitive impairment to dementia at five times the rate of those with slow-moving disease, the analysis showed.—Courtesy: Sciencedaily.com